


Pelican Bay State Prison, California, USA

by Person



Category: Max Brooks - World War Z
Genre: Gen, Yuletide Madness
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-12-24
Updated: 2009-12-24
Packaged: 2017-10-05 04:50:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,008
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/37984
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Person/pseuds/Person
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Why did we crack open the tunnels beneath North Korea?</p>
            </blockquote>





	Pelican Bay State Prison, California, USA

**Author's Note:**

  * For [noondreams](https://archiveofourown.org/users/noondreams/gifts).



**Pelican Bay State Prison, California, USA**

[The Secure Housing Unit of Pelican Bay has been surrounded by controversy since the prison opened in 1989, but never have the debates been so fierce as those revolving around the woman sitting before me now and the twelve shipmates who returned home with her. Speak any of their names and arguments will break out immediately between those who feel that the supermax prison is unfairly harsh for their crimes, and those who believe they should have been sentenced to death for releasing a new swarm of Zack on the world just when we were beginning to pick up the pieces.

Tasha Marks someone who could be the focus of so much controversy. The cocky-looking girl who still wore fatigues and kept her hair shorn to military regulation even though she'd joined a private company who's photo had been splashed across the news all over globe when "The World's Greatest Traitors" were revealed to the public is long gone. In her place is a thin, tired-eyed, woman who all but shrinks into her prison-issued uniform.

But when she speaks her voice belies her appearance, still strong and bold even after all that's happened.]

When George Mallory was asked why he wanted to climb Everest, he told the guy who asked "Because it was there."[1]

Why did we crack open the tunnels beneath North Korea? I could come up with a bullshit answer that some people might accept, though a whole lot more would go right on hating us. I could claim we were being all altruistic, climbing down to find out if there were actually people still in there; poor bastards who hadn't seen the sun since before Z-day hit and were still eating twenty-year-old cans of spam and whatever free-dried spacemen food they could drag down with them and who thought the whole world was dead. I could say that our ship[2] was low on supplies after the damp got into a carton the rot got into everything that wasn't canned and we didn't want to steal food out of anyone else's mouth when for all we knew the bunkers might be stuffed with supplies that the whole country had died off without ever using.

But to hell with that. No sob story I could spin you would make people forgive us, or get me out of this place, so you might as well hear the truth. We did it _because it was there._ Because when we got close enough that we could see the coast from deck and thought about how not a person in the world knew what had gone on in there we were all eaten up with the not knowing of it.

Haven't you ever gotten like that? Come on, you must've. Nobody goes running all over the world talking to anyone with a story to share the way you did if he doesn't have one or two things in common with a certain killed cat we've all heard about.

Did Rob have it all planned out from the get-go? That's what everybody's always asking, and I can't say that I know. He was a good boss and a good friend to all of us on that ship, and my momma taught me never to say a bad thing about a dead man unless he's staggering after you trying to get a bite outta your shoulder. But I'll say this much; it's kind of fishy that he staffed the ship with so many ex-Navy and made sure we were all armed.

Just hunting down an entrance to the bunker took a good long while. We knew where a couple were, the ones folks've managed to spot on flyovers and everybody knows about, but were weren't heading for those. Call us anything you want, but we weren't _totally_ irresponsible bastards. If Zack was down there and we couldn't handle him by ourselves, we weren't letting him loose anywhere near a border. We made damned sure that there'd be plenty of time for us to get a warning out before he got anywhere near civilization, understand that? If you only put one thing I say in that new book of yours, make it that one; we tried to be smart about it, even if it was the dumbest thing anyone's ever done.

When we finally got in, it was the creepiest place I've ever been. They call them bunkers so I thought we'd be looking at something obviously man-made, but as soon as we were past that big metal door it was more like a mine; plenty of fortifications to keep the roof from caving in on you, but you didn't have to look far to see the bare earth all around you.

They've told me that when they cracked open doors in more populated areas it wasn't like that, that the tunnel we'd gone in was just so rough because it was off in the middle of nowhere and must've been uncompleted when they all moved down, but I didn't know that then. I just knew it was the first time I really felt sorry for the people who'd been stuck down there all those years, if there were any. I didn't like the idea of being down there for _one_ night, staring up at that rock ceiling and wondering if it was really gonna hold itself up above me while I was sleeping. Being stuck down there long enough to have a baby and raise it until it was old enough to have babies of its own... in a way it's almost lucky that some infected folks snuck down there with all the rest, because I can't imagine they wouldn't have gone mad living down there so long.

We kept our mouths shut on the way down, which felt like the one other smart move we made at the time, but when I look back on that feels stupider than just about anything. If we'd chatted normally all the way in they'd have realized we were there a lot sooner, which doesn't sound like something you'd _want_ unless you figure out that 'a lot sooner' would mean 'not a couple miles underground, with a whole bunch of intersections criss-crossin' behind us that they could sneak up through'.

It would've been a lot less creepy too. We had this one guy with us who spoke Korean, the only one in the group who went down who'd been a non-combatant all through the war. His family'd avoided it by being farmers or something; I never really asked. But he was our translator so we needed to keep him with us, safe as he could get in the middle of the group. That guy, he started whimpering like a puppy as soon as the light from the door to the tunnel was out of sight. That was the only noise we got aside from our footsteps on our way down, and I can't tell you how bad it got into all our heads. I could tell from the looks on everyone's faces that I wasn't the only one who wanted to grab him and tell him to shut it, but that'd mean breaking our silence and _we_ weren't gonna mess up the way he was.

The first groan was practically a relief compared to it, until we heard the second coming from _behind_ us. And the third. Next thing you knew there were so many that you couldn't tell where they were coming from.

I wish I could tell you we were brave. That we fought our way out as one unit like the Zack-killing veterans we were. But you already know that's a lie.

The translator was the first to break ranks and run, of course. Poor bastard probably would've done the same thing even if it _had_ been living Koreans we'd found down there, he'd worked himself up into such a state. He didn't even manage to avoid the first one that came out of the dark after him, poor poor kid.

If we'd been out in the light, or even in a cave wider than a hallway, we might've been able to keep it together. But we were stuck in a dark claustrophobic hell-pit instead, and now I know what that guy from Paris you talked to was talking about when he said they had the hardest job in the war. I'd fought Zack a hundred times before--in the fields, in cities, pulled up dripping from beneath the waves--and before that day I'd have told you I didn't have a drop of fear of him left in me.

I panicked like a trapped animal. We all did. God must've sent down an angel just for us to make sure we at least had enough sense to turn and run in the right direction to get out, that we didn't shatter each other's skulls when we were trying to fight our way through.

Not that it helped much. To many of them had come up behind us, because we were too dumb to stop before the first intersection and wait awhile to see if anything caught a whiff of us. We should've _known_ not to skip straight past them. The first rule of fighting Zack in the city; the line doesn't keep heading east until you know the north and south are clear. Don't give him a chance to circle around behind you. Why'd we think it should be any different just because we were in a tunnel? Hell, we should've been _more_ careful about it! At least you've got room to maneuver on open streets; we didn't have that there.

Fifteen of us went in there. Six managed to get out of there. Most folks don't know that Rob was one of them. They hear he never made it back and they say "See what happens? The arrogant bastard went down looking to be a hero, and got his ass killed for it."

They don't know a _damn_ thing. He chose to stay back there, you know that? Him and half the folks who'd stayed behind on the ship and were still fresh enough for a fight. He knew the mess he'd made and he did his best to clean it up again, and to hell with anyone who doesn't give him credit for that. They say there were twenty-three million zombies down there? Well he'd have taken out every last one of them himself if he could, and I'll bet you that all of them who stayed made a damned good start of it once they were on the outside and Zack could only squeeze out of the tunnels a few at a time.

Forget what I said earlier. If you only take one thing for your book, make it that. Whatever else you can say about him, Rob and the rest of them who stayed behind were _heroes._

I wish I could say I'd been that brave. He wouldn't have let me stay anyway--he sent everybody who was worn out back to the ship and wouldn't hear a word of argument--but I should've tried. Hell, I could've hidden away while they set sail and snuck back to join him when it was too late to say anything against it.

But that fear was in me, like I hadn't felt like I was still a little girl in pigtails and Zack had just driven everyone crazy with panic by hitting our shore. If you'd asked me going in I'd have told you I was the biggest, bravest, undead-killing bitch you could ever hope to meet, but the most important time of all I was nothing more than a curious kitty who screwed things up for a whole lot of people than ran away with my tail between my legs to save my own ass.

It's a damned good thing I was out of the military by then. _Non sibi sed patriae_[3], huh?

_Fuck_, but I made a shitty officer.

**Author's Note:**

> [1]A common misquotation, the actual line attributed to George Mallory was "Because it's there".
> 
> [2]The _RV Scripps_; some have argued that the ship being named in honor of The Battle of the Five Colleges is a clear sign that owner Robert Hunter, who had fled Harvey Mudd during the Great Panic rather than join his classmates in their stand, had planned his actions in North Korea from the start, seeking his own moment of heroism.__
> 
> [3] "Not self but country", the unofficial motto of the United States Navy.


End file.
